Exhibition October 17. 207 9 - March 29, 2020

Parque del Retiro, Palacio de Velazquez

Mario Merz Time Is Mute

Rinoceronte [Rhinoceros], 1979. Private collection, Madrid. (Photo Paolo Mussat Sartor)

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE

REINA SOFIA HINISTERIO DECULTUR.A, Y DEPORTE

mm ~*~ GOBIER~O OEESPANA

Mario Merz: Time Is Mute

Associated with the arte povera movement that favored the use of "poor" materials from nature and from the waste of the consumer society. Mario Merz (Milan.1925-2003) is a key figure for understanding the evolution ofEuropean art in the second halfof the twentieth century. Merz created a conceptually rigorous oeuvre of great poetic and iconographic power that was also a radical critique of industrial and consumerist modernity. He believed that the zeal to accumulate drove human beings away from nature and into an alienated life from which consciousness ofcommunal life had been banished. along with the possibility ofestablishing emotional rather than merely instrm11ental connee-lions with the environment.

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Igloo (Tenda di Gheddafi) [Igloo (Qaddafi's tent )] . 1958-1981 Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin. (Photo Paolo Pel lion)

October 77, 207 9 - March 29, 2020

Like other povera artists, Merz used recycled objects and materials oforganic origin (sand, clay, wax, branches, coal .. .) and from the industrial world and consumer culture (tiles, glass, neon lights, wire, newspapers) to create his paintings, sculptures, and installations.

Merz embraced a certain anachronistic perspective that is key to his work. To express this, he used a range ofsymbolic and iconographic strategies, from the idea of nomadism, which runs through his oeuvre, to the use ofpremodern and protoindustrial references that evoke prehistoric times, as in Rinoceronte (Rhinoceros, 1979) and Piccolo caimano (Small alligator, 1979). Merz sought to invoke a kind ofmythical time and space, free from the shackles of historicity and productivity, an aspiration admirably encapsulated in a metaphor he often used when he spoke about his work: the "prehistoric wind from the frozen mountains." This invocation was not a mere rhetorical device or a melancholic appeal to an idealized past but a powerful means of critique: it allowed him to express his rejection ofthe increasing consumerism of contemporary society and highlight the need to (re)connect with fundamental human experiences such as building and dwelling, to bring (back) to the center our relationship with nature.

Although he had started working as an artist in the 1950s, it was in the late 1960s, against the backdrop ofpolitical and artistic upheaval in Italy and around the world, that Merz laid the foundations ofhis artistic vocabulary. It was then thathe made his first installations with igloos, a motifhe saw as a metaphor capable ofinvoking the primordial and ontological sense ofdwelling. Merz (like the situationists, to whom he was close) believed that this idea-which is expressed in works

Mario Merz: Time Is Mute

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such as Noi giriamo intorno alle case o le case girano intorno a noi? (Do we go around houses, or do houses go around us? 1982), and Casa sullaforesta (House in the forest, 1989)-had been distorted by modernity, when dwellings became an extension of factories.

Another key element in Merz's work is the table, which interested himbecause ofits polysemy: a table is an everyday object and also an altar, a space for working and for intimacy, a place for meeting and celebration. A simple board to which legs are added sums up Merz's "povera" methodology, in which the humblest materials in our ordinary surroundings become art and are endowed with aesthetic value by a poeticizing gaze. The paintings and installations Merz created using tables arranged or portrayed in the form ofa spiral, such as Peri tavoli (For the tables, 1974) and Tavolo a spirale (Spiral table, 1989), are one variation ofhis prolific artistic research and creation around the Fibonacci

progression, an infinite series ofintegers introduced by the Italian mathematician Leonardo de Pisa (1170-1241), in which each number is the sum ofthe two that precede it: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... This mathematical formula, which describes a recurring pattern ofgrowth in the biological world (seashells, tree branches and leaves, plants, etc.), has been used extensively in the fields ofscience and art since its discovery in the thirteenth century. Merz's almost obsessive fascination with the series is due to its ability to explain and represent highly complex biological, physical, political, and social phenomena. Transcending the limits of Cartesian mathematics, the Fibonacci series shows that there is an organic connection between numbers and the natural world: that the human and the natural worlds are partofa continuum. This numerjcal progression from the individual to the group in a social context can beseen inFibonacci Napoli (Fabbrica a San Giovanni a Teduccio) (Fibonacci Naples [Factory in San Giovanni

Che fore? [What is to be done?), 1968-1973 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired jointly through the d'Offay Donat ion with.assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008. ICJ Tate. London. 2079

a Teduccio], 1971). Works such as this, which Merz made with the workers in a Neapolitan factory in southern Italy, help to establish the political dimension ofhis art, which was influenced by the pressing needs ofhis historical context in the industrialized city ofTurin and northern Italy in the 1960s and1970s. In this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, with its intensification of the workers' struggle, Merz expressed his visceral rejection ofthe consumerist world, which he considered the main instrument ofdomination and alienation in advanced capitalist societies.

Merz's artistic practice was an exercise in resistance against the predatory designs ofcapitalist modernity. An exercise that he believed could be carried out only by exploding the rationalist and productivist paradigm on which it is based. This led him to generate a hybrid artistic practice in which the political combined with the poetic to form an indivisible whole, as can perhaps most clearlybe seen in some ofthe works he made with neon lights (a material he often used). Che fare? (What is to be done? 1968), which is a direct reference to the text in which Vladimir Lenin outlined his strategic and organizational proposals for revolutionary parties; Igloo di Giap (Giap's igloo, 1968), on which he placed the motto ofNorth Vietnamese general and strategist Vo Nguyen Giap; Citta irreale (Unreal City, 1968); and Sciopero generale azione politica relativa proclamata relativamente all'arte (General strike political action relative proclaimed relatively to art, 1970), are

October ll 2079- March 29, 2020

Igloo di Giap [Giap's Igloo], 7968. Musee national d'art moderne/Centre de creation industrielle Centre Pompidou, Paris.

(Photo Paolo Pell ion)

emblematic examples ofthis strategy at a time marked by the consequences ofMay 1968, the youth protests against the Vietnam War, the student and workers' struggles in Italyin 1968 and 1969, and the strikes in Poland in 1970.

Mario Merz: Time Is Mute explores the various aspects ofMerz's work through a selection of more than sixty pieces. The exhibition revisits the artistic artifacts and motifs that made him famous, as well as lesser-known projects that he made at the

start and in the final years ofhis career. While it invites us to engage with an intense and complex visual universe, the exhibition also seeks to contribute to reverting the depoliticized and unsituated reading ofhis oeuvre, emphasizing its unwavering and indisputable critical intent. In a sense, the growing political, social, and environmental crisis we are facing, which calls into question the future of our world, allows us now more than ever to conceive ofthe symbolic nature and the relevance ofMerz's work as a critical manifesto for a new era.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soffa

Main venue

Sabatini Building Santa Isabel, 52

Nouvel Building Ronda de Atocha s/n 28012 Madrid Tel: (+34) 91774 10 00

Opening hours Monday to Saturday and public holidays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Sundays from l O a.m. to l :30 p.m. the entire Museum is open from l :30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Collection l and one temporary exhibition remain open (check website)

Closed on Tuesdays

Exhibition rooms in all venues will be cleared 15 minutes before closing time.

www.museoreinasofia.es

Parque del Retiro venues

Palacio de Cristal Palacio de Velazquez

Opening Hours Everyday April to September from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. March and October from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. November to February from l Oa.m. to 6 p.m.

Images: <Cl Mario Merz by SIAE, VEGAP,

Madrid, 2019

Nim 828-19-009-7 0. L.: M-32608-2019

Related Activity

Tours Art, Nature, and Degrowth Tours around the Work ofMario Merz Monday October 28 and Tuesdays November 5.12, 79, 2079-5 p.m. Palacio de Velazquez. Exhibition rooms

Free entry subject to seating capacity. Preregistration is required; email: actividades.culturales@museoreinasofia.es Language: Spanish

Exhibition organized by Museo

Reina Sofia in collaboration with Fondazione Merz

Education program developed with the sponsorship of:

•santander Fundaci6n